


Reincarnation and What Comes Next

by Griselda_Gimpel



Category: Valdemar Series - Mercedes Lackey
Genre: Angst, F/M, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 21:07:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26544211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Griselda_Gimpel/pseuds/Griselda_Gimpel
Summary: Lavan Firestorm and Kalira reincarnate in an attempt to be together.
Relationships: Lavan Chitward/Kalira
Comments: 8
Kudos: 19





	Reincarnation and What Comes Next

There are many ways to entreat the divine. Some do it on their knees in desperation. Some come in devout supplication, awed by the forces whose help they wish to enlist. And then there’s the rage method, which is what Lavan Firestorm was engaged in.

: _WHY??_ :

: _I do not know,_ : Rolan responded. He was unmoved by Lavan’s outburst.

: _Bullshit._ : Lavan stamped his hooves as he Mindspoke. : _I didn’t wait sixteen years – sixteen years! – for the gods to pull this shit on me. The least they can do is give me an explanation._ :

: _It’s been longer than sixteen years since you died,_ : Rolan said. It was a placid correction, as if Lavan’s anguish was irrelevant to his day.

: _Whatever,_ : Lavan snarled. It felt like sixteen years to him. His fiery death had been followed by light of another kind, a light so bright he could barely look at it. Then the gods had sent his soul away – away from the planet. He’d spent what felt like a day in the void, with stars hurling past so fast they seemed like a blur. Souls don’t need to breathe, and there was no oxygen around him, but still he burned. There were no observers in the depths of space, but he imagined if any had seen him, he would have looked like a shooting star.

He was still putting off blazing heat when he was dropped to the bottom of a deep ocean on an alien planet and had an iceberg deposited above him.

He burned it all away.

He melted the ice and evaporated the water of the sea.

It took him three days.

By the time he had finished, his temper had cooled even if his grief still threatened to swallow him. The gods had pulled him back then, and he’d finally entered the Havens.

Only to find that Kalira wasn’t there.

The gods said that she’d been reincarnated. He’d sworn at them and cursed them with every blaspheme he knew. Then he’d demanded they send him back as a Companion, too. He’d told him that if they didn’t, he’d burn down the Havens. They’d relented, and he’d come to as a newly born colt in Companion’s Field.

And Kalira wasn’t there.

He should have known then, but denial is a powerful emotion. He considered the various possibilities. When none of the other Companions recognized the name Kalira after he arrived an awkward, clumsy thing bleating in Mindspeech for her whereabouts, he reasoned that perhaps she was now known by a different name. And as he took his first stumbling steps and began meeting the other Companions only to find that none of them were Kalira, he entertained the possibility that she might have already Chosen and have been out in the field. And when she never returned to Companion’s Field, he considered that maybe the gods had misled him and that she hadn’t been born yet and that he just needed to be patient. The other Companions told him that he needed to focus on growing up and then finding his Chosen. That had taken sixteen years, but when it was time, Lavan felt a pull deep inside of him that was truer than anything else he’d ever felt before.

In the present, Lavan turned his attention back to Rolan. : _And I can’t even Mindspeak to her?_ :

: _She does not have that Gift._ :

: _But I_ could _._ :

: _And I could Mindspeak to Talia,_ : Rolan countered, : _but I do not. It is not permitted. It is better for our abilities to be underestimated. It is in that way that we serve our Heralds and the people of Valdemar._ :

: _Bullshit,_ : Lavan said again, but the fight had gone out of him. He shoved his way past Rolan and went to his stall in the Companion’s stable. A girl was curled up asleep in the hay. She had eyes the color of cornflowers and hair of the palest blonde.

It was Kalira. It was his Kalira, reincarnated as a human – reincarnated as his Chosen Herald. He had come back as a Companion so they could be together, and she had come back as a human for the same reason. He huffed and then settled down next to her. When Herald Talia had told her that she could sleep in the stables if she wished, Kalira had taken her up on the offer. She might not remember, but a Lifebond was a Lifebond.

“Lan,” Kalira murmured in her sleep, using the name Lavan now used. He whuffed softly at her, encouraging her without words or Mindspeech to return to sleep.

After three hundred years, they’d finally been reunited. But they couldn’t be together, and he was forbidden to even talk to her. If Lavan was before the gods in this moment, he would have incinerated them.

**Author's Note:**

> For anyone not familiar with relativity, if you go fast enough, time will pass for you at a rate greater than one second per second. In effect, you can time travel to the future. In real life, people have only been able to time travel a tiny bit into the future, but that's how Lavan had a few hundred years go by without him experiencing it as such.


End file.
